Advanced Analytics: Matching Skills with Requirements
For most companies that rely on web analytics to make critical business decisions, the days of hits and page views are nearly over. Sure, page views will continue to be an important bellwether about the health of your site as a whole. But increasingly, deeper analytics are expected. And with each increasing layer of complexity, staffing the analytics team becomes both more critical and more difficult.
It was one thing to point your log files at an instance of packaged software and review the (often limited) results that analytics could parse from a server log. It is quite another to set detailed reporting requirements, many of them custom and particular to your business, and then perform the necessary page-tagging that will facilitate accurate, meaningful reporting. Often you’ll need to go beyond simple web pages. What about pop-ups and Flash modules? Have you thought about tracking Ajax-based activities? Perhaps it’s no surprise: tracking Web 2.0 functions can be especially challenging.Â
A major difficulty facing analytics users today—even very large ones—is the search for the right skills to facilitate complex, evolving web analytics deployments. Often, the internal skills are both dispersed within the organization and incomplete. For instance, many companies have something like an “analytics administrator” responsible for providing reports to different audiences. But this person often lacks the technical skill to define complex tags or troubleshoot their deployment. The same company may have a developer team that knows how to get tags onto the pages, but not what they should be designed to do, nor how to create them. And while many companies have analysts that can define business requirements and understand the output from analytics tools, those analysts neither develop reports themselves nor have the deep technical understanding of networks and integration tasks necessary to facilitate the critical reports they need.
It is unlikely that any one person will combine all the best skills of an administrator, a developer, an analyst, a strategist, and an analytics technology specialist. That said, the requirement does imply a class of professionals that blend of some of these skills to some degree.
Call them Web Analytics Professionals. Currently these folks are found only in a few organizations, and at a handful of consulting companies. They are in great demand. Can large organizations hope to locate, hire, motivate and keep such professionals on the cutting edge of technology and best practices? As with any highly specialized, rapidly evolving profession, it may prove difficult—but perhaps not impossible.
Here are some of the traits commonly found in Web Analytics Professionals:
Curiosity: Analytics is about finding answers. Often self-starters, analytics professionals need to understand objectives and formulate questions that, when answered, perform a serious business function. With requirements constantly evolving, the tendency to ask the right questions needs to be innate.
Technical Mastery: After all the requirements are set, someone has to “make it happen”. While often tool-specific (Omniture, WebTrends etc.), the professional’s technical mastery needs to extend to tag development, network analysis and integration with third party systems. They may not need to know all about your third party systems, but without significant coding and integration skills, the professional will end up saying “I don’t know” too often during the course of an analytics project. Typically, technical mastery requires continuing study (see “self-starter” above).
Liaison: Communication with marketing, business lines and IT are all required. The Web Analytics Professional will need to come across as a friendly partner to each of the three. A person who is chiefly a marketer may appear superficial to the IT folks. A business-line specialist may be too narrowly focused on specific reports to understand how to leverage analytics as a platform. A professional buried too deeply into IT may be perceived as a back-room coder who doesn’t “get” marketers or their imperatives. You’ll want someone who has enough perspective to understand that all three disciplines have a critical interest in analytics—and sufficient communication skills to make all three feel duly served.
Granted, the search for people who blend the above is likely to be a long one, and keeping them may be tougher still. But give the industry time. The first step is to define the class, then find examples of suitable candidates. If that sounds like it will take a while, it may. Today, there are companies who specialize in analytics consulting and some of them may be an answer to current needs. These companies are blending the skills needed for analytics success and are typically called upon to augment staff in ways that help companies go beyond traditional reporting.
Certain organizations (like the Web Analytics Association) and certain industry events (most notably the eMetrics events held nationally) nurture the growth of this professional class. There are course offerings, workshops and discussion groups where critical knowledge can be assembled. Wide membership in and support for these forums will be critical to maturing the industry.
Finally, a note on the supply-side: this is a great time to be in web analytics—it’s a growth industry, and appears to be holding its own even when other sectors may be cutting back. For web analytics practitioners (or anyone who thinks they might want to be one), here is some advice: build yourself into a Web Analytics Professional, and they will come.
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Andrew Edwards is a founder and former board member of the Web Analytics Association. He is a founder and Managing Partner at Technology Leaders, a New York City-based web analytics consulting company.
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